Prodatron finally released version 3.0 of his multi-platform operating system SymbOS that is available for Amstrad CPC, MSX, PCW / Joyce and (new) the Enterprise. I won’t bore you with all the details of this release, because the Changelist is huuuuuuuge, so read it by yourself ;-). But there are some neat features like ZIP / GZ decompression and new applications e.g. for Telnet or IRC. If you have one of those computers, you definitivly should check the new version and we CPC users can enjoy the network stack and more supported hardware with this release.

Shining, well known for his great games Defence and Pentomino, just released a Amstrad CPC version of the “Bad Apple” animation of the Touhou Project on the Evoke 2017 in Cologne / Germany. The hardware requirements are high, you need 1 MB RAM (e.g. X-Mem and Y-Mem) and a MX4 board. You can download the version at the end of the news and for the rest of us, Devilmarkus captured a video and uploaded it to Youtube:

A new version of Sugarbox, a Amstrad CPC emulator for Windows, was released. The main features of the new version are emulation optimizations, support for the PlayCity and Multiface-II hardware, ZIP support and various other improvements (see changelog for more information).
Be sure to test the new version of the emulator and download the latest version from http://sugarbox.free.fr.

Changelog:

[Gate Array]: Fix mode changing : Imperial Mahjong now looks better!

[Expansions]: Add support for the Playcity

[Expansions]: Add support for the Multiface II cards.

[Z80]: Complete recoding of the Z80 core. It now use the real M and T states, and handle WAIT states correctly. More accurate.

[General]: ZIP support (only zip file at the moment) for tape and disks

[IPF]: IPF created is striclty equivalent to the original dump (in term of MFM track)

[IPF]: Minor fixes in IPF reading

[DSK]: Fix some wrong behaviour. Dsk reading should be more reliable (and will no longer crash)

[DSK]: Fix a bug in saving DSK file. It should no longer crash (anyway, if you can avoid using it, prefer HFE or IPF format !)

[Emulation]: All peripherals are now running in the correct timings.

[FDC]: Index detection fixed on Sector writing (Imperial Mahjong is able to save its configuration)

Roudoudou released a new version of his Zilog Z80 cross-assembler called Rasm. Of course it supports all the undocumented opcodes, but beside of that, you can use conditional macros, a floating point engine and several mathmatical functions. A special feature is the possibility to create a cartridge for the Amstrad Plus or the Amstrad GX4000 directly by assembling your source code and you can automatically add an AMSDOS header to your binaries. It also supports crunched sections (the coded will be loaded and crunched on the fly) for LZ48, LZ49, LZ4, ZX7, and Exomizer. It has also a compatibility option to support the widely in the Amstrad CPC used MAXAM syntax. You can download and discuss it at the CPCWiki forums and at the end of this news.

After the great success of the last CPCRetroDev last year it is time for a new game competition in 2017 again, isn’t it? This year, you can win around 1100 EUR in all different categories. As usual the competition is organised by the University of Alicante (UA) / Spain and aims to award the best and creative game developers, who create a game for an unmodified Amstrad CPC 464. The deadline for this years competition is the 31st October 2017, 23:59h (CEST), so don’t waste any time and start the development of your awesome game (you will find a countdown on the top right of this page :)).If you are not familiar with development for the Amstrad CPC, you can have a look at the CPCtelera game development kit, the great programming tutorials on CPCMania, the CPCrslib programming library or cpcitor’s development toolchain. As always you can find help in the CPCWiki forums.

You can achieve the following awards (all in all about 1.100 EUR!!!):

Official Awards (1.100 €)

Special Mentions

100 € – Gominolas to the best music

100 € – Carlos Abril to the funniest game

100 € – Pablo Ariza to the best Artificial Intelligence

PRO Category

300 € – Best game

175 € – Second best game

100 € – Third best game

50 € – Fourth best game

25 € – Fifth best game

UA Category

100 € – Best game made by UA students

50 € – Second best game made by UA students

Additional Awards

RetroSpiel Award

German enterprise RetroSpiel will award with a physical publication, distribution and selling of an extended version of games presented by two selected teams.

You can get more information about the competition rules and about the competition itself on the CPCRetroDev 2016 homepage. Be sure to participate and bring your creative game ideas to the Amstrad CPC.

Meta

Legal Information

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.